Guus Bosman

Today is a day for some experimenting with new software for this website. For a long time I wanted to change the program I'm using, and after quite some research I've decided to make a switch to MMBase. This is a Java-based system that is used for many major (Dutch) websites, such as Nu.nl, Overheid.nl, Amsterdam.nl and many broadcasting organisations (Vpro, Netwerk, NOS).

This will be a lot of (fun) work, so it will take a while before you'll see any results. In fact, I'm trying to keep the difference as small as possible; you can see a very first result here.

Two weeks ago, when I was in Washington, I noticed that a harddisk of the server was slowly stopping. This Tuesday it broke down completely, taking down the whole server.

Repairing turned out to be harder than I had thought. The harddisk was completely broken and some other parts weren't looking too good either.

Sponsored by my parents I bought some new hardware for the server. Currently the site is back up, and it's running on a 1,6Ghz processor with 512MB memory.

It looks like the hard drive of Guus Bosman.nl is really reaching the end of its life.

The website itself still works (obviously, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this), but I'm afraid the situation isn't very stable.

I hope the site will keep working until I'm in the Netherlands again.

I'm looking at a program to create an (internal) website for Chess. I found a very nice one (see experiment), but it runs a bit slow; it requires a quick computer.

On their website somebody recommended to install an "accelerator". I did so, and the difference is remarkable! It also affects Guus Bosman.nl a little bit: some 20% faster.

I installed a new harddisk this morning. The server now has 40.85 GB harddisk space, instead of 0.85 GB.

There are many reasons why I have this website. It allows me to stay in touch with people who I don't see everyday, and it's cool to be able to look back now and then, and see what I did almost a year ago.

Another reason is that I like "playing" with a website -- a hobby indeed. This weekend I've been reading a book on website design, called "Don't make me think". I knew that my website is not the most user-friendly ever, and that not everybody appreciates the yellow background. The last days I've been trying to incorporate some of the books' ideas in the layout of this website. It's not completely ready yet, some small things here-and-there, but I hope you'll like it.

It took me longer than I thought, but yesterday late I finished the installation of OpenBSD 3.3. In the process I removed my whole /usr directory, because it contained a lot of old stuff. This required me to re-install (the binaries of) Apache and MySQL, which I did this morning. That went very smooth, in 20 minutes the installation was ready. The webserver is running since 9.10 o'clock again.

There is still some configuration to be done, but at least the websites work again (not only this one, but also Jaap Bosman.com and 2otherwise.nl).

I just moved Apache to a chroot environment. Wanted to do this for a long time, and it was actually very simple. Now I'll see if I can install OpenBSD 3.3... it turns out I don't have to use a diskette! (why this is so nice). From the documentation:

"On some platforms, bsd.rd is actually the preferred installation technique -- you place this kernel on an existing filesystem, boot it, and run the install from it. On most platforms, if you have a running older version of OpenBSD, you can FTP a new version of bsd.rd, reboot from it, and install a new version of OpenBSD without using any removable media at all"

It didn't work:

I guess it was worth trying, but Java on such a small server is probably not a good idea anyway. PHP it will be, for now.

I've just installed the harddisk Gerben gave me; it works fine. Currently I'm seeing if I can install a Java-based webserver for some experiments. I'm afraid it won't work because it requires a lot of diskspace and processing power. There is no native Java implementation for OpenBSD, so Java is used through a Linux-emulation layer. Not only will this be quite slow, but it also requires me to install the redhat-compatability package, which is huge.